This is the Memory Palace, I'm Nate DeMau.

This President in State Week will remember Franklin Pierce.

Someone asked him.

Pierce was the Mac.

He was handsome, he was rich, he was connected.

His dad was the government of New Hampshire.

He's in the state legislature at 24 in Congress before he's 30.

He does Washington up early 19th century style, going to all the right parties,

flirting chasely with senators' daughters, debating esclists or the Magna Carta or whatever until dawn,

and drinking all the time, all the time.

He gets a reputation and he starts to feel terribly about it and just generally terrible.

He's a loud drunk and he's abrasive and he's always hung over.

He tells a friend he needs to stop and straighten up his act.

The friend sets him up with a woman named Jane Appleton, a minister's daughter.

She's shy and frail and devout with a melancholy streak.

Franklin figures she's just the kind of person he needs to save him from himself.

Jane hates DC.

She hates the parties.

She doesn't trust her husband's friends as old drinking buddies.

She keeps telling him to quit politics as a senator by now.

The move away from this awful place and it's bad influences and it's booze.

Eventually he does, he resigns his seat.

...